O’Brien has vi­sion for Cork PRO role

CORK County Board PRO can­di­date Cian O’Brien is hop­ing to con­tinue the good work of his pre­de­ces­sors and take com­mu­ni­ca­tions to the next level if he is elected to the role.

Glen Rovers/St Ni­cholas club­man O’Brien is the out­go­ing PRO of Rebel Óg, hav­ing been in­volved since the new un­der­age body came into be­ing in 2011. He also served a year as Rebel Óg IT of­fi­cer and has been on the Cork GAA PR com­mit­tee for nine years, two as sec­re­tary, also serv­ing nine years on the IT com­mit­tee.

In ad­di­tion, he has been a coach ed­u­ca­tion tu­tor for nine years, with three years as an IT tu­tor and served one year as de­vel­op­ment of­fi­cer for the Cork County Mi­nor Board. When Féile Peile was held in Cork in 2011, he was part of the or­gan­is­ing com­mit­tee.

“Dur­ing my time in Rebel Óg, I have worked with four county board PROs,” he says, “Ger Lane for one year, Tracey Kennedy for three years, Ed­mond For­rest for one year and cur­rent PRO Donal Leahy for three years.

“I have built our so­cial me­dia fol­low­ers up in twit­ter to 10,800 and dur­ing this time sent more than 30,000 tweets with 6,000 on Face­book.

“Dur­ing my last full year in charge of the Rebel Óg web­site, we had 2,395,473 hits on the site, which was in­crease from 1.5 mil­lion in 2016 when web­site was not mo­bile re­spon­sive.”

O’Brien has pre­vi­ously run for PRO in 2014 and 2015. He is join­ing Adrigole’s Joseph Blake in the race and is keen to fo­cus on evolv­ing the on­line and so­cial me­dia as­pects of the role.

“My vi­sion for the role of PRO if elected is to im­ple­ment a clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion plan,” he says.

“This would in­clude ar­eas such as de­sign­ing a com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan to col­late and dis­sem­i­nate news­wor­thy items for the club and county.

“There would also be a smart­phone app to al­low push no­ti­fi­ca­tion up­dates direct to mo­bile phones and I’d hope to de­velop and pub­lish a monthly Cork GAA news­let­ter. In ad­di­tion, I want to de­velop our com­mu­ni­ca­tions channels in line with Cork GAA’s vi­sion and strat­egy, pro­mo­tion up­com­ing games, events, work­shops, com­pe­ti­tions and events through so­cial me­dia and me­dia out­lets and con­tinue to de­sign and de­vel­op­ment Cork team an­nounce­ment graph­ics and videos along with pre-match posters and ad­verts.”